The Four Wonders of the Corona World
Most of my Gonzo Paper trips down memory lane turn into horribly meandering tangents that end with me screaming about Geico or some other shit. This one, unfortunately, will probably be no different, though since I refuse to plan these things in advance there’s no telling where we’ll be six or seven paragraphs from now. I’ll probably start off nice and slow down memory lane as usual and somewhere along the way find myself talking about the moon landing (which was faked on Mars. Maybe. I know a guy who swears he was there, but that guy is Dr. Gonzo and he was likely hallucinating.) The only possible saving grace for the rest of today’s edition would be me actually ending up where I’m attempting to go—the problem, of course, is I don't have any destination in mind.
Yikes. This might get ugly. We’ll see. As Steve Jobs once told me when he was on acid, “Memory is a strange beaver.”
Right. One thing, at least, is clear in my memories: my childhood love of K’Nex. I’ll start there, because it seems to be about the only thing holding any of these disconnected thoughts together in the dizzy blank cloud that is my brain. Ever lived inside my head? Imagine an electrical storm that isn’t plugged in to an outlet. Oh, Jesus [I’m going insane]. Lost control there for a second [I lose control more frequently than ever before]. I almost lasted two paragraphs before I started rambling again, but of course there I went [I’m afraid that one day I’ll start rambling and be unable to stop]. Where was I? K’Nex. Right. Okay. Did you ever have those things? Do you know what I’m talking about? Does the word “K’Nex” ring some ancient bell inside you, like when you see your third-grade teacher at Walmart ten years later? [Ignore the italicized stuff in brackets. It’s my second personality trying to escape.]
Anyway, for those of you that didn’t have the same childhood as me and several million other suburban white kids, this is what K’Nex looks like:
The long skinny things are colled “rods,” and the spiky things are called “connectors.” The connectors connect the rods. Obviously.
The point of K’Nex is to build shit, like a real masculine ape. When I was probably 6 or 7 [at that age I was already dying, just like all of us] my dad brought home two large green bins he had picked up at some shitty garage sale for like 50 cents. Inside the bins were hundreds and hundreds of brightly colored plastic pieces that I quickly learned how to snap, slide, and link together. Jesus, I loved that shit. All the instruction books were like gateways to another world. With just a few hundred hunks of plastic, I could create models of anything—cars, boats, tall buildings, roller coasters, ferris wheels, motorcycles, rockets, planes, dinosaurs, basketball courts, cranes, seesaws, merry-go-rounds, helicopters, trucks, the Chrysler Building, the Space Needle, windmills, bridges, picture frames, animals, clock towers, arches, pagodas, the Taj Mahal, anything.
In my peak K’Nex years—the “K’Nex Era” of my life was sandwiched between the “Calvin and Hobbes Era” and the “Juggling Era,” but those are stories for a different day—I was probably building something new several times a week. Between 3rd and 6th grade I made several hundred different things out of K’Nex, whether they were from the instruction booklets or not. [There are no good ideas in my head.] Sometimes I just needed something around the house and instead of asking my mom to buy it I’d make it—when I was like 11 I needed a new little bookstand so I made it out of K’Nex, and I remember once making my dad a cassette tape holder. Picture me, eight years old, in our dark, damp basement in the middle of winter, Ben The Builder snapping together tiny plastic pieces to make a six-foot tall replica of the Chrysler Building, happy as can be. I’ve spent my life since then chasing that high. [Those days are gone forever].
But are they?
I certainly thought so—until six months ago. In one of the stranger twists of my personal fate in this year-of-strange-twists, K’Nex, very unexpectedly, made a roaring comeback in my life this spring. Quarantine, for me, meant moving back to my childhood home. So it was perhaps only inevitable that a few weeks after I returned to Gretna in March, already terminally bored of life under lockdown, that I found myself hunting through the old toy closet in the basement. And what did I see? Two green bins stacked in the corner.
Talk about rediscovering a lost time. After I found those tubs, and the hundreds of K’Nex pieces that had patiently waited in them for ten years, I spent a significant portion of quarantine building giant replicas of famous buildings on my bedroom floor, just like I did when I was a kid. I found it was one of the easiest and most enjoyable ways to pass an afternoon while nothing was open and there was nothing else to do. I found my high.
I started with the Eiffel Tower, because it was the first result when I googled “famous buildings,” and I had never tried to make the Eiffel Tower before. [The Eiffel Tower isn’t real. None of these buildings are real. This blog isn’t real. Nothing I write means anything. Go to sleep.] With no planning, no instructions, and no intention other than to make something out of K’Nex that was recognizably the Eiffel Tower, I spent about eight hours of trial and error creating this fucking bad boy:
Ignore my messy bedroom. The Eiffel Tower is what’s important.
I hadn’t told anyone I was working on it, so when I was finished I brought it downstairs and startled the shit out of my mom. She was very proud of her 21-year-old son for spending all day playing with toys meant for preteens.
Regardless of the aptitude of K’Nex for people my age (I’d like to consider it something that’s fun for everyone. Believe it or not, engineers use K’Nex to design shit), I was hooked again. Over the next month or so, I re-created several other structures: The Flatiron Building (a wonderful suggestion of K. Evelyn Dean), the St. Louis Arch, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The Arch was the hardest because K’Nex pieces don’t bend very well and it didn’t want to balance, the Flatiron was tough because I suffered from a severe lack of materials, and the Leaning Tower was, well, the fucking Leaning Tower of Pisa. [Fuck the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In real life it took them three hundred years to build it and they still royally fucked up. Yes, really.]
To conclude I could offer several insightful and profound remarks about how 1) things we loved as children can bring us joy today, 2) our greatest buildings stand as celebrated monuments to art and innovation around the world, 3) the guys who invented K’Nex are like billionaires now, 4) quarantine probably made me clinically insane, and 5) this all shows how lives come “full circle.”
But I won’t. Instead I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes, from another childhood staple of mine called The Dangerous Book for Boys. The section I liked the most was on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the authors’ closing remarks kept coming to mind as I rediscovered K’Nex, snapping those little plastic things together for hours:
“Even the greatest wonders can be lost or broken by the passage of millennia. Perhaps the true wonder is the fact that we build them, reaching always for something greater than ourselves...”
Ah...shit, man. I can’t even think up anything witty for comment. What else is there to say? [Nothing can be said. Don’t listen to me. Memory is a strange beaver indeed.]
P.S.: If you want to see what some people can do with K’Nex that’s actually fucking insane, I highly recommend watching this:
